This is a world of shiftings and disappearances. Nothing is fixed or simple. Not even the landscape itself is stable.

Ports silt up, and rivers – including the great Meander river, which makes its way across Anatolia into the Aegean – lazily and insistently drag soil with them so that you can, for example, stand in the ruined ancient Greek city of Priene, where the philosopher Bias (who gave his name to the word) used to ply his trade, and know that the sea once came as far as these very stones. The same sea that is 9km away today.

Now, instead of the rolling waves hitting against cut stone that Bias would have witnessed, there is flat land as far as the eye can see, alluvial soil where cotton grows, a desolate, brown-coloured plain. The names of the places have shifted and changed as well. The nearest big city, the Turkish port of Izmir, for example, was less than 100 years ago the Greek city Smyrna.

This is a landscape that belongs to the gods, even though it gave way over time to Greek and Roman mortals, to Byzantine and Turkish power.

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In the new gallery in the museum at Aphrodisias, near Ephesus, you can look at the military poses and blank faces of the Roman soldiers in statue after statue. They stand for power and empire; often, in the same frieze, just in case you were wondering who is in charge, there is a slave or a barbarian beneath them with his hands tied. With dogged skill, the Romans spread their empire east – Ephesus became their centre of power in Asia Minor.

It is the statues of the gods, however, that make you hold your breath. They give you a sense of this landscape – the Aegean coast of Turkey – as sacred, a place where a great battle took place over many centuries, not merely over land and power, as the Greek gave way to the Roman, but over belief, over the next life filled with promise as much as this one filled with toil.

The faces of most of the statues of the gods in the museum have been cut away, while the faces of the Roman civil potentates remain in place. This gives the broken, disfigured statues of gods such as Athena, Aphrodite, Asclepius, Hygieia, Eros and Demeter a strange mystery; it is clear that they had to be neutralised because of their immense and enduring power. But whoever did this to their faces did not have the courage to break up the statues of the gods entirely. As early Christians, they were still too afraid of the might and majesty of those they once appealed to. They wished to replace them, they did not cease believing in them.

In Ephesus itself, there is a great, shimmering void. It is the Temple of Artemis, once one of the seven wonders of the world. Now almost nothing survives; the place where it was built is a palpable emptiness, a sign that this was a haven for invaders and destroyers. It was a place that specialised in changing hands. The levels, layers and signs that history has left on this landscape make it fascinating.

A temple first built on this site in the 7th century BC, for example, was destroyed and rebuilt; the new temple was in its time destroyed again by a man called Herostratus, an early vandal who burnt it to the ground so that his name would go down in history. Then, thanks to financial help from Alexander the Great, what rose next on the site was considered the most wonderful of all the temples built here. This was destroyed once more in AD263 by the Goths. A more modest temple put up in its place fell into ruin once the power of Christianity grew.

All of this was overseen by the great matriarchal goddess Artemis, whose cult was merged with that of the local deity Cybele, known as the great mother, when the Greeks came here first. In the archaeological museum in Selçuk, near Ephesus, there are some magnificent statues of Artemis that give a sense of her power. Besides being the goddess of the hunt (she was known as Diana to the Romans) and of chastity, here at Ephesus she was also the goddess of fertility. On her upper torso in these statues hang many breasts. On her lower body and around her head there are elaborate carvings. Since so little of the land around has been excavated, it is presumed that many other statues of Artemis lie under the ground.

It is easy to imagine how difficult it might have been to accept a decree that Artemis’s power had been replaced by the power of a mere man on a cross. St Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, wrote about how the goddess’s cult persisted in Ephesus. The local silversmiths, who made their living from creating silver amulets used to worship Artemis, banished St Paul, who came here to preach Christianity and demanded an end to the worship of the goddess. The silversmiths chanted hymns to her glory as a way of shouting Paul down when he preached.

As you stand on the scrubland where the temple once was, you can see that the stones from Artemis’s temple were used for the Basilica of St John from the 6th century, which towered above it on higher ground. It is now in ruins, but its former glory is still apparent from the columns that have been

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